Location: In Connecticut, on the Housatonic River near its mouth at Long Island Sound.

Posts: 11,189

iMac meltdown

As some of you know, my iMac bit the dust last Thursday. Turned out to be a failure of the power supply. Apple nicely replaced it at no cost (through an excellent authorized service center right here in town), and I picked it up yesterday evening. Everything seems fine.

It goes a tiny bit faster now; I took the opportunity to get two 2GB RAM to replace the two 1GB I had before (I believe this machine only makes use of 3GB but they don’t make 1.5s and Apple recommends using pairs).

They couldn’t tell me what caused the problem. There were two odd events in the couple of weeks before the machine refused to boot last Friday: a loud electrical-sounding buzz lasting a couple of seconds; and waves of thunderstorms last week, including one on Thursday (that hurled icecube-sized blocks of ice at our windows in 70 MPH winds).

The technician said he saw some odd things about the power supply as soon as he opened the computer, but no scorching or other signs of its having experienced a great surge of electricity.

So I will never know. In 24 years of owning Macs this is the first early failure of any sort. My 128K Mac’s power supply failed when it was nearly 5 years old — the screen looked like it was melting. And my second-hand Mac II needed a logic board replacement when it was 4 or 5 because the SCSI system shorted out. Both of those machines earned their failure, and both were cheaply repaired.

Ah, well. I’m back in business. It was an awful weekend — Eudora absolutely would not collect most of my e-mail no matter how I fiddled with the settings. Instead of doing something sensible, like locking up and letting things go until I got the iMac back, I kept trying to fix it. I was being an idiot. Eudora got it all today, no problem.